The market for electronic medical record data transfer equipment and applications, valued at $575 million in 2008, is forecast to reach $1.6 billion in 2013, according to a study by research firm Kalorama Information.

Driven by the growing use of EMRs in hospitals and physician offices, this segment of the patient monitoring market will grow 23.3 percent annually through 2013, notes the report, "High-Tech Patient Monitoring Systems Markets (Remote and Wireless Systems, Data  Processing, EMR Data Transfer)."

Increased use of EMRs and high-tech patient monitoring systems is a key piece of President Barack Obama's plan to fix the ailing healthcare system, the report notes, because they have the potential to improve patient outcomes and satisfaction,  provide cost savings and more efficient use of healthcare resources and reduce hospitalizations.

Patient monitoring produces a vast amount of data, but this data can be disjointed and located in different places, Kalorma notes. EMRs give patients and physicians greater freedom, improves accuracy and should result in better outcomes as critical records are all in one easily transportable record.

Home healthcare agencies and nursing homes have been slower to adopt EMR systems due in part to the high cost of implementation.
 
In 2004, President George Bush established the position of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology within the Office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This position was created to help achieve the president's goal of most Americans having access to an interoperable EMR by 2014. In support of this idea, various regions and states have formed health information exchange projects that are essentially centralized repositories for patients' EMRs, the research shows.

"And now, President Obama has made EMRs a significant part of his healthcare initiative," the report states. "This should be a boon to the industry, though there are some hurdles to overcome first."
 
"While the idea is admirable and achievable in the future, there are significant hurdles at present," said Bruce Carlson, publisher of Kalorama Information. "EMRs must be accessible to healthcare providers, but also be secure. Security and privacy concerns, a lack of fully adopted standards, problems with inputting old patient data, competition between healthcare providers who may not want data shared with rivals and significant implementation costs are all hindering progress."